Department of Experimental and Applied Psychology, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Van der Boechorststraat 7-9, 1081 BT, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Institute Brain and Behavior Amsterdam, Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
Atten Percept Psychophys. 2023 May;85(4):1088-1105. doi: 10.3758/s13414-023-02667-8. Epub 2023 Feb 23.
Previous studies have shown that during visual search, participants are able to implicitly learn across-trial regularities regarding target locations and use these to improve search performance. The present study asks whether such across-trial visual statistical learning also extends to the location of salient distractors. In Experiments 1 and 2, distractor regularities were paired so that a specific distractor location was 100% predictive of another specific distractor location on the next trial. Unlike previous findings that employed target regularities, the current results show no difference in search times between predictable and unpredictable trials. In Experiments 3-5 the distractor location was presented in a structured order (a sequence) for one group of participants, while it was presented randomly for the other group. Again, there was no learning effect of the across-trial regularities regarding the salient distractor locations. Across five experiments, we demonstrated that participants were unable to exploit across-trial spatial regularities regarding the salient distractors. These findings point to important boundary conditions for the modulation of visual attention by statistical regularities and they highlight the need to differentiate between different types of statistical regularities.
先前的研究表明，在视觉搜索过程中，参与者能够在跨试次的基础上隐性地学习关于目标位置的规律，并利用这些规律来提高搜索表现。本研究探讨了这种跨试次的视觉统计学习是否也延伸到显著分心物的位置。在实验 1 和实验 2 中，分心物的规律是配对的，以至于下一次试验中特定分心物的位置 100%可以预测另一个特定分心物的位置。与之前使用目标规律的发现不同，当前的结果表明，在可预测和不可预测的试验之间，搜索时间没有差异。在实验 3-5 中，对于一组参与者，分心物的位置以一种结构化的顺序（序列）呈现，而对于另一组参与者，分心物的位置是随机呈现的。再次，对于显著分心物的跨试次规律，没有学习效应。在五个实验中，我们证明了参与者无法利用关于显著分心物的跨试次空间规律。这些发现为统计规律对视觉注意的调节指出了重要的边界条件，并强调了需要区分不同类型的统计规律。
